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How To Get Great Copy Without Hiring A Copywriter

By Ken Hoffman in Featured

Most business owners now understand the importance of strong copy. What many business owners don’t realize is there are other alternatives to paying a fortune for great copy.

Most of these do require a nominal investment. But nothing compared to the huge fees for copywriting. A big part of the value a copywriter brings to the table (aside from marketing knowledge and being a wordsmith) is a fresh perspective. It’s that second set of eyes from a new perspective that can catch mistakes and provide more successful approaches.

Unfortunately, copywriting is deceptively simple. Almost anyone that can write to any degree thinks they can write great copy. Creating a piece of copy that causes the reader to take the action of spending money simply from reading words on a page is no easy task.

1) How A Simple Copy Critique Can Improve Your Copy

Perhaps the simplest way to improve your copy is getting a copy critique. In the direct marketing industry this is a common term. Professional copywriters use copy critiques to sharpen each other’s skills and copy. You can either hire someone to do this for a few hundred dollars typically, or you might be able to find someone to do it for free. Just be careful that you are getting someone who knows what they are talking about.

The biggest value here is having things pointed out to you that you missed. It could be a headline that’s unclear. Or a part of the copy that causes the reader to stop or bail out. Even your entire approach may be all wrong. These are all things you can find out with a simple copy critique.

If professional copywriters can improve from a copy critique, imagine what it can do for someone who’s not a copywriter.

2) How A Simple Rewrite Of Your Copy Can Help

The next step up from a copy critique would be a copy makeover. Not all copywriters offer this, because sometimes if the copy is way off track, it’s more work to rewrite it than just starting from scratch. The key to this is you are doing most of the legwork. Not recommended for rank beginners at copywriting. However, if you’ve got a sense of good copy and you can get something together in rough form, sometimes a simple rewrite of your rough draft can produce some great copy. And again, because it takes a lot less time than writing from scratch, you’ll save a bundle on copywriting fees.

Be careful because not everyone has the same definition or scope of what a rewrite entails. Some just fix the worst parts. Others do a complete rewrite and edit of what you’ve written. So read the fine print and find out exactly what you are getting before you commit.

A rewrite is more expensive, but still a fraction of hiring a freelance copywriter to create your copy from scratch.

3) Get A Free Consult From A Marketing Consultant Or A Professional Copywriter

Most copywriters and marketing consultants offer a free consult upfront. There’s nothing wrong with calling a few of them to get some contrasting opinions. In the process you’ll most likely pick up some great ideas that you can apply to your copy. Just having a short conversation with someone who knows marketing can give you some great insights.

You can generally tell pretty quickly whether you are dealing with an experienced copywriter verses a rookie. Be careful in putting too much stock in anything they say.

Test it out for yourself first. Make sure that it’s a direct response copywriter/marketing consultant. They are the only one’s who use methods proven to sell, as opposed to just creating general awareness of your business.

If you are speaking with a marketing consultant focus the conversation on the sales strategy and positioning of your product. If you are speaking with a copywriter focus more on the specific aspects of your copy. The most important parts of your copy are the headline/opening and your offer.

4) Model Your Copy After Proven Marketing Promotions

If you have to do the copywriting yourself without any help, be sure to have a successful model available. Avoid generic templates. Model your copy after an example that’s already proven to work. Only then will you be sure to at least have the structure in place that follows proven sales formulas.

What you want to do is copy the structure, not the content. Try to stay close to the structure because the further away you get from the original the less likely you’ll end up with a winner. For example, when modeling this classic headline, “They laughed when I set down at the piano, but when I played…” I’ve seen some people leave off the second half of the sentence. That destroys the curiosity building power of the headline.

Also changing it from “laughed” to some other emotion like cried can be risky. So be careful. Try to make a fill in the blank template out of it.

Here’s a simple example. “They laughed when I _______, but when I _____.” Do this with every sentence in the copy, not just the headline.

This is probably the single best way to write your copy if you aren’t a professional.

5) Record Your Best Sales Pitch And Then Have The Recording Transcribed And Edited

The other simple way to write copy yourself is to do this. You need someone that knows how to sell. If you aren’t good at sales then have someone else in your company or else have a friend help you.

The key to this working is to have a good sales person, record their best “pitch” live and uncensored. Then have it transcribed and edit it to take out the um, ah, etc. Do NOT edit into something that takes away the conversational tone. Be careful to maintain the essence of what they said.

That’s why you really don’t need to write copy. You can record it being spoken by a sales person. You end up with the same end result. Just make sure you have a good sales person and they know your product well so they can make the best pitch possible.

These are the five best ways I know to improve existing copy or create it from scratch. The power is in getting an outside perspective, using proven principles of selling, and using the time saving of rewriting rather than starting from scratch.

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Ken Hoffman is a strategic business adviser and direct response copywriter. He is the author of “Scientific Advertising For The New Economy.” Download his free report, “17 Website Conversion Strategies To Boost Your Bottom Line.” Download it now from www.goodmarketingforbadtimes.com/ezine.html.

16 Questions Critical To Starting An Internet Business

By Dele Ojewumi in Featured

It is usually overwhelming for a prospective internet marketer at the point of starting an internet business.

What with the many aspects he has to consider.

1. Does it matter whatever domain name I pick?

2. How much should I invest in this online business initially before it starts generating revenue?

3. What advertising sources do I invest in and which do I get free?

4. What website type do I use – static or dynamic?

5. What online marketing training program do I join to put me through? Which are the best of these online marketing training programs?

6. Which forums do I hang out at where I can find my colleagues in a similar niche? Which are the best of these forums?

7. How do I get my website set up? Do I design it from scratch, use templates or even go for an already completely set up website?

8. What plethora of internet marketing tools and resources am I required to keep and utilize?

9. On completion of my website set up, how do I subsequently keep updating it? Update myself or outsource?

10. If I learn to update my website, what software or web platform is most ideal for me to get this done?

11. What blogging platform do I use – blogger or wordpress?

12. Do I start with just one internet affiliate program and after making some progress begin to add others?

13. Of the available internet affiliate programs, which do I join?

14. How will the internet affiliate programs I intend selecting pay me my commissions?

15. How fast will I start to make money online with affiliate program?

16. Can my country’s nationals fit perfectly into the internet affiliate programs I intend getting involved with?

As you can see, these are all valid questions that arise in starting an internet business and I can go on and on.

It should by now be apparent that there are so many other necessary questions that you cannot even imagine, given the depth of your training and experience in internet marketing as at now.

It is thus best you seek guidance in starting your own small business, as some mistakes made at the outset cannot be corrected later on, along your internet marketing journey.

The objective of pointing out a microcosm of the necessary questions that should arise in starting an internet business therefore, is for you to get assistance before it is too late.

This assistance is best with an online marketing training program and many are free.

When you join such a program, it is like killing many birds with one stone, as you discover that most of these questions get addressed and you get tailored towards achieving your objective.

Of course, you have to join the best of these online marketing training programs which has the characteristics of a good online marketing training program, to get value, as there abound many out there that are mere theoretical programs which will not serve your purpose.

The questions identified above are not theoretical such as can be addressed in an e-book or a theoretical course but requires a multidimensional practical approach which is best given in a good online marketing training program.

Let us quickly drill down to just one of the above questions – How do I get my website set up? Do I design from scratch, use templates or even go for already completely set up money making websites?

When you are new to internet marketing and web designing, I will advise you to go for pre-setup money making websites as there are a lot of things to take into consideration in setting up a website for internet marketing purposes such as on-site search engine optimization.

It is also for this reason that it is advisable you get money making websites from an online marketing training program rather than just have a web designer design one for you as many things that are internet marketing related have to be taken into consideration if your website is to perform optimally in the search engines, which you may not know contributes about 70% of traffic to websites on the internet.

Again, perhaps you do not know yet, traffic is the lifeblood of any internet marketing business, as your website is as good as dead without traffic.

Is it any surprise therefore that in starting an internet business, you have to carefully select an online marketing training program to lead you along the right path?

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Dele Ojewumi is the webmaster of www.homebiz-supermarket.com. He is an Internet Marketer, Chartered Accountant and Economist who has helped many internet marketing newbies get the right online marketing training at his website.

You can also visit his blog => www.homebiz-supermarket.com

Google’s Need For Speed Means You Need to Check Your Website

By Chris Kaminski in Featured

Not too long ago Google released a new search tool “Google Instant.” Google Instant tries to speed searches by anticipating what you are going to type next based on what you have searched in the past. When you start typing Google offers you a selection of results and you can watch the results change with each letter typed. Google claims that it will save 3.5 Billion global seconds a day! I don’t know about you but I feel better knowing that I won’t be searching for the same thing fifteen years from now.

Putting aside the privacy issues and the file Google has on each and every one of us, let’s look at how this will affect your website and your search placement. In that same Google interview they stated they will pursue all options to shorten search times. At the top of the list was site load times and robot read times.

We already know there are rules to govern the code to content ratio, keyword density and placement, and content quality but this rule goes right to the foundation of every website. This rule speaks right to the background code, which by the way, has changed a lot over the years. Under this new rule the load and read speeds of your website will have a direct affect on your ranking.

How do you know if your website needs to be updated?

1- Web code standards and browser capabilities have advanced a lot in a short time. If your site is pushing five years since the last tune up, it is time to look.

2 – Was the original site written with outdated or obsolete WYSIWYG software? These are notorious for adding tons of erroneous code (Google already penalizes for this).

3- Copy placement. Search bots only read so many words in to a website. It is important that these be the important words. We call that “strategic copy placement.”

4- On-page optimization. Is your website easy for Google to find and more importantly, understand where you want to be listed? Older sites have little or no optimization at all. This is especially true with WYSIWYG and templates.

How do you fix this problem? Sorry, there is no short answer. The best thing to do is find an experienced website designer and get an evaluation. Not an artist turned developer but a good design / code / search optimization team. I have argued this point many times in the past and won’t go into here. But, other than the graphic design there are two other components to a website. These two parts together are the most important components. First, the way the site is written and second is the search optimization, which includes current market research.

What the code should look like, again that is too deep to cover here. We coined a phrase a couple of years ago “search engine positive code”. This is how your website is presented to the search engines. You need to give it to them the way they want it. This is now critical to website placement and that is important in this competitive environment.

Once you have the evaluation tackle it one step at a time. You can re-do the code with minor changes to the design. Another option is to just re-do the index page. The occasional overhaul is part of the normal evolution of maintaining a website. Technology changes and you have to also, you can bet that your competition will.

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Chris has been owner and head designer since he started LBS back 1979. His marketing experience crosses all media and Chris is settled firmly into web design and marketing. With his first website going up in 1997 Chris has himself as one of the leading Web Design Studios in Western North Carolina. Based in Asheville Lone Bird Studio has a proven record of results and satisfied clients. Check him out at www.lonebird.com.

Website Development Strategy That Will Drive Customers

By John Carroll in Featured

Take this one question quiz:

What should be the first step in developing a website?

1. Creating a design to use as a basis,

2. Deciding how the content needs to be integrated and managed,

3. Gathering content from corporate collateral,

4. Developing a strategic plan for your specific needs, or

5. Choose the most cost-effective hosting plan.

In just about any profession other than website development, your answer would be choice 4. After all, you couldn’t build a house without considering the layout, number of bathrooms, and features of the home. You wouldn’t create a design for a major advertisement and then plan the content and message of the ad. Yet, when it comes to website design, often the design comes first and the strategic plan for the site comes last.

5 Ways to Market your Online Content

By Jack Collins in Featured

You now have a finished piece of content on your website. How can one go about getting the most visitors to the new piece? Having faith that users will magically gravitate to your new page is extremely optimistic. The following contains 5 actionable tips for marketing your website content.

Pretend it’s for Print

It all starts with the quality of your content. Treat the piece that your writing as if it’s not easily changed after you’ve put it out there. Publishing content on the web has made us all a bit lazy with this. Knowing that we can just go back to fix or tidy up after the fact puts a little less pressure on us to produce perfect content. Remember that people are taking time out of their lives to focus their attention on you. Make it worthwhile.

A Dash of SEO with that Please

After you’re happy with the content take a once over for the search engines. Don’t bastardize it. But if you want to get the most long term exposure for your content try to align your web page’s message with your website’s search engine optimization strategy.

You could adjust:

-Your page title and meta description. Remember that these are the only two elements that search engine users see on search results pages. Try to have it read like a newspaper headline.

-The name of your post. If you can have good keywords here by all means do so.

-The permalink. Adjust your URL to be relevant to your content, keep it void of unnecessary words like “and, the, or” and include keywords.

-Your on-page headlines and actual copy. Skim through all of this for keyword opportunities that will ADD to the quality of your piece.

Just make sure that you are covering your bases seo-wise. If you set up your page properly you will give your writing every chance possible to be picked up by search engines down the road.

Remember Email Marketing?

If you’ve built an email list over the years then send out a quick campaign about the article. I wouldn’t suggest that you copy all of your post content into the email. I would use the email as a teaser. Give the email recipients reason to visit your website and read it there. My reasoning for this is that there are many more viral opportunities if the content is digested on your website vs in the email itself. Be sure to give enough useful information in the email itself though. This way if they don’t click through they wont feel their time has been wasted.

Feed the Birds

After you’ve done this go share your post on your favorite Social Media Channels like Facebook and Twitter. Be careful not to sound too sales-like here. People can get easily turned off by this. Ask for reciprocal links in a non demanding way. Saying things like “The most brilliant post on widgets EVER!” will get you no-where fast. If a comment is left make it a priority to respond.

Make it Easy to Share

Be sure that you give your readers every chance possible to share your content with their tribe. This is where the real potential of Social Media Marketing begins to shine. Someone sharing your post with all of their community has just exponentially increased your articles reach. It’s free marketing! Most content management systems have ways to add this functionality to your posts and if you aren’t using a CMS it’s not hard to hand code. Take a look at the bottom of this post for an example and feel free to try it out .

There are many more venues for reaching out than what I’ve described above including Pay Per Click Advertising, Article Distribution marketing and Direct Mail to name a few. Following the steps above is a sound strategy and a good starting point for giving your work the help it needs to be seen.

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Connective Web Design is an Internet Marketing Company offering Social Media Marketing Services. Learn more at www.connectivewebdesign.com/services/social-media-marketing

How to Get More Web Traffic by Adding Free Tools to Your Blog

By Doug Prentice in Featured

What’s the one thing that any blog just can’t survive without? Traffic. Whether you blog is a hobby blog or that’s designed to make you money, they all need traffic. However, if your blog is of the money making variety it’s probably much more important that you get as much traffic as you can.

Personal blogs also need a steady regular flow of traffic.

But that is purely optional. On the other hand, if you are running a blog with a business mindset, then it’s nothing without a non-stop stream of traffic.

Just typing the phrase “how to get more web traffic” into any of the popular search engines will reveal a host of links to all sorts of traffic driving schemes, from the free and legal to the paid for and sometimes of questionable legality. But before jumping to any of them, you first need to understand the working methodology and benefits of using such free tools in your blog.

RSS reader: This can be one of the best tools to make it easy to keep your readers updated and visiting your blog. When you use this tool in your blog, you give the readers a chance to get latest updates from your blog 24/7. With this in place it is one of the real proven tools for traffic creation.

Technorati: Technorati is a must for any blog owner. It’s one of the topmost social bookmarking sites. Once you insert the required code, a button with the name of Technorati appears in your blog. Moreover, when you submit your blog to Technorati, it’s pretty much guaranteed that a lot of fresh visitors will be automatically arriving at your blog through the Technorati platform.

Digg, Facebook etc: When you add these free buttons to your blog, then you can you can feel pretty confident that you’ll get a slow but steady stream of web traffic. If someone likes the content of your blog and Diggs it, and it spreads, then you should get a nice little unexpected boost to your traffic.

Twitter: The growth of Twitter as promotional tool for blogs has been nothing short of sensational. To say that the user base of twitter is on the rise would be quite an understatement. By the simple act of adding a Twitter button you can unleash an avalanche of traffic. Moreover, promote your blog posts on a regular basis via twitter to ensure maximum web traffic.

Use a ping service: In the simplest terms, pinging means informing the search engines like Google that you have added new content to your blog. There are several free ping services available over the internet, which can be used free of cost. By signing up for any of the ping services your site will get more traffic as a result of the more frequent indexing of you blog pages.

So, rather than wondering how to get web traffic for your blog, you first need to understand the basics of getting web traffic. This will allow you to make effective use of various online tools and promote your blog the way you want.

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Doug Prentice writes for beginners in internet marketing regularly revealing the tricks and tips that he discovers. Read Doug’s blog at www.doug-prentice.com for regular updates. Want to learn more about getting free web traffic? Sign up for Doug’s Free 7 Day Course.

Mobile Marketing – The Different Types Of Mobile Websites And How They’re Used

By Jason Drohn in Featured

More and more people are signing up for advanced mobile plans, which means that smart business owners and entrepreneurs have a window of opportunity open to them right now. Mobile marketing is cheap and people don’t have ‘banner blindness’ when it comes to their mobile device.

Those to things spell out an incredibly easy marketing solution. What I want to do is lay out a few different ways mobile marketing. Then, I’ll follow it up with a few resources you can check out for more information.

Mobile Squeeze Page

Mobile squeeze pages serve one purpose, and one purpose alone, to collect data. Basically, what you do is offer a free download of some kinds or discounts/coupons to visitors who sign up for your email list. That way, you can market to them again and again in the future.

Using A Check Out Page As A Mobile Landing Page

Another effective way of mobile marketing is sending prospects directly to your main product page or the page where they can sign up for your services. Obviously, a higher ticket item will need some pre-selling, but lower end offers work well.

Mobile Landing Page – Phone Number

One of the best innovations of mobile marketing ads is its click to call technology. What that means is that when someone clicks an ad, it automatically dials a phone number! That’s awesome for pizza shops and doctor’s offices!

Does Mobile Marketing Work?

Right about now, I’m sure you’re thinking that all this stuff is good in theory. But does it actually work?

On a cell phone, there is very little screen real estate. The user only has so many options… Sign up for your free download or exit the page. More times than not, the person will sign up so they can get your information or they’ll call you. It really is incredibly effective.

A properly designed mobile website won’t have any distractions at all. It’ll have a call to action and a action option… Something that the user has to do.

Graphics will be minimal and the page will seem relatively simplistic. That’s OK though, because mobile phones are typically much slower than normal computers and will need more computational power to load the page.

My Mobile Marketing Results

Based on the testing I’ve done, mobile marketing is definitely a big hit. Generally, people who view mobile websites or find your business on Google Maps are very well targeted. They know what they want and are willing to pay for it. If you place an email marketing opt-in box on the mobile page itself, you’re going to get lots of new leads. The ‘click to call’ option is also really impressive.

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For a free mobile marketing report, make sure you visit mobilemarketingreviews.org. Also, make sure you check out at Mobile Monopoly. It’s the best mobile marketing training I’ve seen so far.

What Is Meant By Site Activity?

By Steve Weber in Featured

Site activity is a new and important part of the Google algorithm used for ranking websites for specific keywords. Only recently has Google made this new aspect of site activity and integral part of their ranking process.

Recently the search engine has been buying up companies that supply tool bars for browsers which track user activity. This will enable Google to monitor traffic to websites from all different sources and even for those websites that do not have their analytics software installed.

Originally, it was the site content that was most important for optimizing and achieving good rankings in the search engines. There was a time in the 1990s that optimize content, and often times what we now consider over optimized content, was all that was required in order to get good traffic to websites via search engines.

Then later Google added the importance of back linking. A backlink is simply a link which occurs on another website pointing back to a different website. Google implemented what they call their page rank scale, which can be seen for any web page by installing the Google toolbar, which tracks not only the numbers but also the quality of the sites back linking to a given web page.

All things being equal, the higher the quality and quantity of back links to a given site will enable that site to rank better in the search engines for giving keywords. So for quite some time it was mainly the content in the back linking to a given page that allowed Google to determine how they would write that page for a specific search keyword. Of course are ways to manipulate the back linking. There are programs and software available which can obtain mass backlinks in a short amount of time.

Google of course realizes these programs are available to webmasters and they have their limitations on the numbers of backlinks and the timing of those links to given web pages. In other words too many backlinks too soon can result in a much poorer ranking and sometimes even a banning of the websites if Google determines to aggressive back linking was used to manipulate the rankings.

Because there are ways to manipulate the back linking system, Google has now made site activity an important part for how they rank web pages. Basically, site activity is simply traffic to specific web pages from different sources.

For example, traffic to come into a webpage from YouTube videos,twitter, Facebook, article directories, blog postings, other websites, and forum postings. These would all be considered traffic and site activity which Google could track via their Google analytics software and also the many browser tool bars they are purchasing.

Webmasters must realize that nowadays quality content and backlinks are not the only thing required for search engine optimization. In addition to those important aspects of SEO, site activity must now be considered also. For a new website, traffic is always difficult to obtain in the beginning. Some of the quickest ways to obtain traffic from a variety of sources is video marketing, article marketing, and social media. These are all easy to implement and will provide the much needed site activity Google needs to see in order to rank specific pages well.

Keep in mind that the more competition there is for a given area no more important site activity will be for achieving first page rankings in the search engines.

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Learn more about SEO and site activity at Weber Internet Marketing.

Small Business Help: Top 25 Websites

By Marco Carbajo in Featured

With the large amount of information and resources available on the internet it can be quite a challenge for entrepreneurs and small business owners to find the small business help they need.

From deciding whether to start a business, setting up or acquiring a business, raising capital, acquiring credit, marketing, social media marketing, working with customers, growing your business, working online, selling online, and much more it’s vital to have access to resources you can depend on.

Below are my top 25 all time favorite websites that provide small business owners the much needed support, news, information, resources, and tools to succeed in business today.

1) AllBusiness.com

AllBusiness.com has a variety of small business resources, advice, and business ideas for entrepreneurs and small businesses to start, manage, finance, and build a business.

2) Bplans.com

Bplans.com offers free sample business plans, business plan software, business calculators, and articles on writing a business plan, starting a business, and other small business topics.

Would Jesus have tweeted?

By John Sylvester in Featured

With all this social media around I have asked myself if Jesus would have tweeted: “Performed miracle at Cana wedding. Guests thirsty and restless. Asked mum to fetch more water”, or “Cranking out a few parables after lunch with Stephen Fry”?

Recently, the Pope was in Britain and warned of “aggressive secularism. Meanwhile, the Vatican has launched www.pope2you.net, linked to Facebook and an iPhone App. Recently I have become extremely bored with Mashable and TechCruch stories on iPhone apps and decided to turn my attention to the effects social media, in particular, and the internet in general are having on our lives

One such article suggested that humankind is in the midst of a radical and unprecedented transmutation of its collective society, such as in debilitating disparity between rich and poor, globalised economic insecurity and a species-threatening ecological crisis. Perhaps.

Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry on The Ten Commandments in the televised Intelligence Squared debate asked how “the Galilean carpenter” would feel about the wealth of the church, attacked its hierarchy and the “twisted, neurotic and hysterical way its leaders are chosen”, while Ann Widdecombe led to the familiar story of Moses and how he came to write down the ten basic rules passed to him by God. With social media so dominant in our society, would that have been posted on Facebook, one wonders.

A friend of a friend, Simon Critchley, recounts in his book The Book of Dead Philosophers that Voltaire, after decades of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church, announced on his deathbed that he wanted to die a catholic, while Heraclitus, who believed that everything was in a state of flux, died, according to one account, of drowning in cow dung.

He goes further to suggest that philosopher Francis Bacon, the great champion of empirical method, died of his own philosophy: in an effort to observe the effects of refrigeration on a freezing cold day, he stuffed a chicken with snow and caught pneumonia. Then we have Julien Offray de La Mettrie, atheist and hedonist, who died after eating large amounts of truffled pâté and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who saw life and death as part of the same timelessness, died the day after his birthday after a friend had given him an electric blanket as a present. “Many happy returns,” the friend said. “There will be no returns,” Wittgenstein gaily replied.

Our consciousness seems to have manifested itself, almost exclusively, on the narrowed values of competition, individualism and externalised success, and the West’s collective rationale has now been set on individualism and materialism that has been grossly overemphasised and reinforced.

When you look at the casino culture of our ruthlessly unregulated financial institutions, they remain tied to our paradigms of separation and competition. Politically and economically, these values stretch institutional ambition beyond traditional borders as we are now witnessing with the emergence of China and India.

But back to basics: Copernicus was credited with contributing the first comprehensive cosmology that replaced the Earth with the Sun as the centre of our system of revolving planetary bodies; Galileo furthered the popularity of Copernican astronomy with observable proof via telescopic advances; Kepler began constructing a bridge between astronomy and the laws of physics that was completed by the work of Newton. Their proven assumptions required cultural adaptation of religious ideology.

However, the once mighty Catholic Church shunned and silenced such discoveries; and these days the religious seem to have taken it upon themselves to have a mightier voice than that of Darwinian biology, and other geneticists, at a time when these ideas were instrumental in bridging a material view of the cosmos with a secular view of nature and evolution.

Maybe Jesus’ followers would, beyond doubt, have retweeted the words, “He’s the one who made it possible to have direct contact with God. We don’t need a middle man,” and restricted the last part of the phrase for lack of character space. Well, the bankers may have come out in revolt over that but I’m sure history has shown us that we only reorient institutions and practices that mirror our assumptions and shifting values of the interconnectedness of digital cooperation.

Postmodernism tends to be a loose composite in all this and is influenced by scientific studies and personal observations that seem to suggest experience is subjective. Similarly, deconstructionists point out the fallacies of objectified or rational truth and the limitations of reductionism.

Or, to use Mr Critchley’s account in On Heidegger’s Being and Time, we should see this as a radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly his theories of intentionality, categorial intuition and the phenomenological concept of the a priori, if you get my drift. Philosophers do indeed die in the strangest of circumstances, as the entire idea of searching for “truth” is in itself now an existential.

But to get back to the point, “Would Jesus have tweeted?” I rather suspect he would have or Barack Obama would have been tweeted beforehand: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time.”

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V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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